


Black Ice

by heavenbows



Category: Disney - All Media Types, Disney Princesses, Frozen (2013), Guardians of Childhood & Related Fandoms, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst, Elsa is not a happy winter spirit, F/M, Post-frozen, pre-Rise of the Guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 10:18:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11378166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenbows/pseuds/heavenbows
Summary: It was not strictly true that Jack had always been alone.





	Black Ice

It was not strictly true that Jack had always been alone. Once, there was another; a fellow-spirit, another shard of winter ice.

Her name was Elsa and she had been a queen. That she remembered her past – her sister, her throne, her kingdom – never failed to send ugly thorns of jealousy through Jack’s heart, even when he tried to be glad for her. Even when it made her weep to have lost those things so suddenly and swiftly through a glass of poisoned wine.

He had heard a saying once – better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Jack wasn’t sure if he’d never loved, but as he couldn’t remember it seemed to come close enough. At least Elsa presumably had good memories to counteract the ache of loss, if her loss did really ache so badly.

And ache it did. Jack was excited to show a fellow winter spirit the fun to be had with snow and ice, but Elsa was perpetually melancholy. If she conjured a blizzard, it was to rage and scream, without a thought for the children who would enjoy the snow the next day. If she walked across a lake and froze it beneath her feet, she never came back to watch the skaters who took advantage of her gift.

To Elsa, winter was a season of cold hearts and bitter loss. Jack sometimes wondered if she even knew what the word _fun_ meant. From the look she gave him when he suggested they build a snowman, he assumed not.

Little wonder, then, that she had been drawn in by the darkest heart of winter. The frozen children, the drownings in lakes where the ice did not hold fast, and the families that huddled around meagre fires. Elsa took no joy in these things; on the contrary, she seemed to feel each suffering as if it were her own, and only fell into deeper and deeper depression. Darkness ate away at her, this queen who could have ruled winter as her own and instead fell prey to it.

Little wonder, in the end, that she had been drawn in by Pitch Black.

Nobody was quite sure what had happened. One day, Elsa simply disappeared. She was never sociable, never sought out the other spirits for company, so her absence was at first unnoticed and then unremarkable, until it finally became curious - and then it was far too late.

Some spoke of it like something out of a Greek legend – Pitch bursting from the shadows to carry her away.

Some spoke of it like a descent – Elsa choosing to embrace the darkness that had pulled at her heart for so long.

Some even spoke of it like a love story – the meeting of two souls in pain.

Jack never believed those stories. He wasn’t sure _what_ he believed, but… it wasn’t anything like that, surely.

He liked to think, sometimes, that it wasn’t anything to do with Pitch at all. Maybe Elsa had made a pact with the moon and moved on to be with her sister. That had to be better than being a creature of shadows and pain, spilling black ice in her wake.

And if Jack ever saw a shadowy, icy being in the corner of his vision when the snowstorms raged particularly fiercely, he put it out of his mind.


End file.
